From a psychology standpoint, i’m really interested in how this type of website might indicate a new frontier for marketers worldwide.

First let me say, I look at something like this and think “hey that’s pretty cool” but the truth is that i’m unlikely to repeatedly go back to a site like this. I already have a big group of sites that I visit regularly and I think this website might get the best scope by selling the feature to Google’s YouTube (for a tidy sum) and have them integrate it centrally as a function.

My website usage aside, something like this is a treasure trove for a marketer – simply because it has the POTENTIAL to show a depth of insight into what people find interesting, and the resulting mainstream popularity that came with it. With a little bit of imagination, it’s not hard to think of these types of websites as ‘trend trackers,’ and once you know how previous trends started, you may be better situated to influence new trends. I say that it has the potential, because in its current form, any observations about online viewing habits are qualitative. But what would happen if TimeTube developed a few neat features to quantify people’s interests:

- Adding viewer count, rating, etc. to reflect how people reacted to the videos.

- Statistical word count, drawn from the comments, to show what people thought of the videos (e.g. Awesome, Cool, Sucks, etc.)

- A different viewing mode that was able to show the rankings of other popular videos from the same time frame in a coherent way (broken down by different kinds of categories).

Tweetmeme is another interesting tool that mines Twitter ‘discussions’ for several keywords. Combine the two and you’ve already got a good jump start at ‘figuring out your customer.’ What’s next?

These types of tools are the tip of the iceberg. I can easily see more advanced ‘interest data mining’ techniques becoming common, packaged, and sold to the world’s companies on a subscription basis. Which leads into a big ol’ privacy discussion, but I think that’s for another day.